Joshua McWhirter
Failed Architecture (FA) reconnects architecture with the real world. By opening up new perspectives on the built environment, we seek to explore the meaning of architecture in contemporary society. Since 2011, we have been providing an inclusive platform for critical urban discourse, fueled by unconventional narratives from an international network of contributors.
Architecture continues to fail because we are stuck in a global economic system which puts profit above everything else, reproducing social and political conditions that undermine people’s control over their built environment. Meanwhile, the (architectural) media reduces the design of society to a spectacular image. As a result, the ...
Instagram photos, public transport information, streamed music and Netflix movies seem to appear out of thin air on your phone, don’t they? Well, getting them onto that screen isn’t as light and easy as it feels. There is, in fact, an immense and decidedly heavy infrastructure powering the cloud. More and more architecture is being designed and built to house server space and internet connection hubs. Since these buildings typically use as much energy as a medium-sized city, our digital lives have a direct environmental toll. Minimising this footprint is one of the data centre industry’s main issues.
This episode was ...
Video games have changed the way we interact with space. From their very inception, these increasingly complex virtual worlds have been forcing new perspectives and new ways of interacting with the world beyond. Once they were able to represent cities, their role in shaping our everyday urban experience became even more acute, thrusting players into environments that they would otherwise have never come close to and exposing them to representations of urban life which will have had countless effects on the way players experienced cities in real life.
But while it’s long been accepted that film, music and other established forms ...
Stereotypes regarding modernist architecture, and in particular the negative discourse on Amsterdam’s Bijlmer estate, have been quite crucial in shaping Failed Architecture’s way of thinking in its early years. Can we really blame the architecture for what went wrong? How can an entire neighbourhood, where thousands of people continue to live their lives on a daily basis, be simply dismissed as a grand failure? In recent years, however, there has been a slow but steady reappreciation of modernist architecture taking place, but rather for its aesthetics than its social ideals.
While architecture from that era is still being demolished at a ...
Failed Architecture Podcast 04: Judging Architecture and How We Design for Kids
Failed Architecture Podcast
Alexandra Lange has been writing about architecture and design for over two decades. Her articles span a wide range of subjects, from building reviews and calls for preservation to furniture, fashion, and women in architecture. After writing for such media outlets as Metropolis, Dezeen, The New York Times, Places Journal, Architect Magazine and The New Yorker, she published the book Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities in 2012. Currently working as the architecture critic at Curbed, her latest book The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids comes out this month.
In this episode, ...
In this episode, we use the work of London-based rapper Gaika to explore the subject of London, talking to both Gaika and Ash Sarkar, a senior editor at Novara Media who has previously collaborated with Gaika, about the city’s near future and its recent past.
Gaika’s work covers a lot of themes, but his “Security” and “Spectacular Empire” projects are among the most incisive articulations of the mood that has pervaded London in the past decade. Produced in 2016 and 2017 respectively, these two projects cover a diverse array of themes: ranging from race, the built environment and the housing market, ...
The area around Calais, a town in northern France, has for many years been a major transit point for refugees on their way to the United Kingdom. During the recent peak in the number of refugees, the French and British authorities increasingly fortified this border landscape, forcing those on the move to build increasingly permanent shelters for themselves. As this self-built city, also sometimes referred to as ‘the jungle’, continued to grow the response of the authorities became increasingly violent. By now, the self-built city has been fully evicted and demolished, displacing its inhabitants.
The media hype following these events prompted ...
Mecca is the holiest city in the Islamic religion and the birthplace of the prophet Mohamed. Located just off Saudi Arabia’s western coast, all Muslims are required to visit at least once in their life if they are physically able to. With air travel becoming easier, the number of pilgrims has been rising rapidly over the last few decades, with a record number of 3 million people visiting Mecca simultaneously during the 2012 Hajj. More recently, visa regulations have been made more strict to keep the situation under control.
In this episode, we discuss with various experts how this rising number ...
Paris’ famous Louvre Museum was forever transformed in Summer 2018 when it was spectacularly appropriated by megastar power couple Beyoncé and Jay-Z, by way of a music video for their single “Apeshit”. Timed to coincide with Everything is Love, their surprise joint album as The Carters, the video saw the couple, and Beyoncé in particular, performing in front of several significant paintings and sculptures in the museum’s vast collection.
Needless to say, two of the world’s most visible and successful black cultural figures seizing control of a space so synonymous with Western imperialism led to a lively debate in the days ...
Failed Architecture Podcast 13: Heroin is Everywhere Now, and It’s Everyone’s Problem
Failed Architecture Podcast
Heroin’s enduring association with the city has helped forge a highly racialised and individualised notion of urban decay. At the same time, it has obscured a whole history of production and distribution that reaches far beyond the urban core, encompassing large and often very rural parts of East, South-East and Southwest Asia where the opium poppy could be cultivated. This association continues to distract us from the fact that heroin users can no longer support themselves in urban centres, because our modern economy has long since forced all but the most productive subjects from the centre of cities, and out ...
Failed Architecture Podcast 14: La Ciudad Es Nuestra, La Noche Es Nuestra
Failed Architecture Podcast
The notion that public space is for everyone, a place where we are all equal, has been used ambivalently to legitimize the exclusion of marginalized and vulnerable populations and to defend their presence in these spaces. Authorities and other social groups, uncomfortable with the presence of the homeless, loitering teenagers, street vendors, sex workers, and protesters, among other ‘undesirables,’ tend to justify their expulsion from public space by appealing to the “public good” or the prevention of “social harm.” The use of public space as a strategy for either “social justice” or “social order” led geographer Bernd Belina to question ...
On June 8th 2020, architecture and design organisations joined countless others to mark their alignment with the Black Lives Matter protest movement by responding to the hashtag BlackoutTuesday with a black square. For the most part, their anti-racist commitment started and ended there. At the same time, however, the initial meetings of Design As Protest and Dark Matter University began. In their words, “DAP is a collective of designers mobilizing strategy to dismantle the privilege and power structures that use architecture and design as tools of oppression”. Emerging from DAP’s demand to create anti-racist models of design education, Dark Matter ...
